Left's very timely gift is to connect our daily human concerns to the convoluted wrapping financial analysis in a moral, populist language that is calibrated precisely to draw maximum attention in a media environment in which screaming is the only way to be heard. operations of the economy,
According to the document, Tanner would sell Davenport millions of dollars of drugs. Then Davenport would share with Tanner the incentive payments he received from Valeant, moving the money through a shell company. Meanwhile Tanner misled his Valeant colleagues into believing that a competitor wanted to buy Philidor. The ultimate goal, the indictment claims, was to inflate Philidor’s value until Valeant acquired it at a huge markup, at which point the two would split the millions that Davenport would earn from the sale as Philidor’s largest stakeholder. (Through a representative, Valeant said it was the victim, not the perpetrator, of the fraud. “It’s important to note the indictment involved one former employee,” the company wrote, adding that it has increased R&D investment by 26%.) In its news release, the Department of Justice gave a hat-tip to “investor websites” for revealing “suspect aspects of ... Valeant’s connection to Philidor.” No one doubted which website they had in mind. The unraveling accelerated through the following year. Today, Valeant trades around $13, from a high of $250. Left says he shorted at over $200 and exited at $70, taking a profit in the millions. Tanner and Davenport have pleaded not guilty; if convicted, they could face 25 years each. Pearson left Valeant last August after liquidating his stock options for somewhere in the nine-figure range. On the morning of December 9, Left pulled up to the Bloomberg television studios in Los
82 | August 2017
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